Final_Judgment

[100] Final Judgment 161
According to intelligence historian Richard Deacon, Israel's relationship with
the CIA (and Angleton, in particular) had been firmly cemented: "On the
American side the Israelis had won a certain amount of unofficial support
from the CIA even during the Eisenhower era. The CIA had been realistic
enough to realize that the Eisenhower appeasement policy towards the Arab
world would ultimately be disastrous for every American interest, military or
economic.
"For this reason they had maintained a policy of allowing all
intelligence operations in Israel to be carried out entirely by the Mossad. In
short, what this meant was that the CIA had no office or station chief in Tel
Aviv, but that certain officers in the US Embassy there co-operated with the
Mossad. In theory this entailed an exchange of intelligence between the two
sides and in practice this worked rather better than one could have expected
normally.
"The key figures in this arrangement were originally [Mossad chief]
Isser Harel, Ephraim Evron, who later became deputy Israeli ambassador in
Washington, and James Angleton, chief of the CIA Counter-Intelligence." 275
(Evron, as we saw in Chapter 6, also became particularly close to John F.
Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, who reversed U.S. policy toward Israel—
and in favor of the CIA's interventionist policies in Southeast Asia—
immediately upon assuming office.)
According to intelligence historian Deacon, Angleton exploited the new
intimate relationship between the CIA and the Mossad for use
internationally: "Angleton, having seen the folly of U.S. foreign policy
during the abortive Suez operation, decided to counteract the State
Department's bias towards the Arabs by close cooperation with Israel. It
was he who first saw the need for a new policy in the Middle East and
safeguards against increasing Russian influence.
A REVERSAL OF POLICY
"He and Evron worked well together and, as a result, the CIA helped
Israel with technical assistance in the nuclear field. Evron was eager to
grasp this opportunity for he had been one of the prime instigators of the
aggressive challenge to [John F. Kennedy's] policy of friendship for Nasser
[and] was instrumental in paving the way to a reversal of the pro-Arab
policy which for a while dominated American thinking, not only under
Eisenhower, but also the Kennedy administration." 276 According to Deacon,
Evron was Israel's most powerful figure in Washington, more highly
regarded than even the Israeli ambassador and was welcomed as a Mossad
liaison officer to Angleton at the Central Intelligence Agency. 277
ANGLETON AND ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR BOMB
There is, in fact, evidence that Angleton was covertly assisting Israel's
nuclear bomb program which, of course, was the primary source of conflict
between JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.